Thursday 23 April 2015

3.1 Phillip Lim Fall 2015 - Pocket Study

3.1 Phillip Lim designed several different types of jackets for their Fall 2015 Ready-To-Wear Collection. Below are an example of three - a slim leather jacket, a bomber jacket and a sleeveless jacket. They all however have the same pocket detailing on their right side: a sideways patch with a zip closure. This is an example of continuity throughout a fashion collection and allows each jacket to be recognised as a 3.1 Phillip Lim. The rest of the collection can be seen here.



Wednesday 15 April 2015

Construction and Deconstruction: A Fashion Film

I came across this short fashion film by Sophie Kennedy with her take on construction and deconstruction. It shows her creating an extravagant outfit from scratch then taking it apart in the same way.

Saturday 11 April 2015

Zip Research

I visited my local John Lewis to have a look at some potential zips to use on the alternate versions of my garments. I found several that were almost perfect such as the two below on the right. The left was a little too long and was silver instead of gold, but the right was denim instead of black fabric. I compromised and picked up the left one to feature in my project folder.




John Lewis did have a wide arrange of zips in varying colours, materials and lengths. The majority however were plastic and suited better for skirts, dresses or suit trousers. There was little choice for decorative zips rather than purely functional ones.

Tuesday 7 April 2015

The Deconstruction of Disney's Cinderella Dress

On March 13, 2015 Disney released its live-action version of the fairytale classic Cinderella. I came across this article about the creation of Cinderella's famous blue ballgown and thought it would be interesting to look at the process.


Three time Oscar winning (10 times nominated) costume designer Sandy Powell was in charge of costumes for the film and started work on them two years before principal photography began. It took a team of 20 people 4000 hours to create eight versions of the dress. She wanted it to look like a "watercolour in motion", for the dress to appear light as air especially when Cinderella was running away.


The dress is made of several layers. The top layer is Silk Crepeline - a very lightweight, fine silk. The layers underneath are Yumissima - an incredibly light and expensive (£150 a metre) material which floats when thrown into the air. Then there are hundreds of miles of frilled petticoats to give volume and lightness. Each layer is a slightly different colour, such as lilac, lavender, greens and blues, to create a unique periwinkle colour. Behind the many layers is a steel crinoline over a wire cage with secret handles for actress Lily James to hold on to.


The corset was designed to give Cinderella the traditional 19th century women's shape. It was revealed that every character wore one, including the maids! The corset made her waist look extra-tiny due to the optical illusion effect of the massive skirt and the detachable 'bertha' at the neckline, which was decorated with dozens of butterflies hand-painted by Hiroshima artist Haruka Miyamoto.


In total, across the eight different versions of the dress made, three miles of thread was used in the hems, 10,000 Swarovski crystals were hand-applied to the dresses, and finally, 250 metres of fabric was used in each separate dress.

Friday 3 April 2015

Quotes from Alison Gill

Taken from 'Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes' in 'Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture'.

"The term deconstruction has entered the vocabulary of international fashion magazines, a label associated specifically with the work of Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten amongst others, and more loosely used to describe garments on a runway that are “unfinished,” “coming apart,” “recycled,” “transparent” or “grunge.”"

"Martin Margiela, a graduate of the Antwerp Royal Academy of Arts, and identified by Spindler and Cunningham as a leading proponent of “deconstructionism,” appear to share with deconstructivist architecture a point of connection around the analytics of construction."

"Margiela sells linings extracted from recovered “vintage” dresses, giving these linings a chance of a new-old life “on the outside,” that is, as lining dresses in their own right. His dresses are made from mis-matched fabrics, lining silks with jerseys, and one can see the inside mechanics of the dress structure — darts, facings, and zippers. Or old jackets have been re-cut, tacked, sewn and re-detailed, their seams and darts reversed and exposed to the outside."

"Accepting that a seamstress or tailor performs a certain labour of “outfitting” bodies and giving them an enclothed form, a labour stitched inside as the secrets of a finished garment, a secret that is kept by the garment itself as it performs “seamlessly,” Margiela literally brings these secrets to its surface."



Maison Margiela Spring 2015 Couture

"Deconstruction in fashion is something like an auto-critique of the fashion system: It displays an almost X-ray capability to reveal the enabling conditions of fashion’s bewitching charms (i.e., charms conveyed in the concepts ornament, glamour, spectacle, illusion, fantasy, creativity, innovation, exclusivity, luxury repeatedly associated with fashion) and the principles of its practice (i.e., form, material, construction, fabrication, pattern, stitching, finish)."

"At one level, the word “deconstruction” suggests a simple reversal of construction and therefore, at this common-sense level, a reading of clothes that look unfinished, undone, destroyed as “deconstructed” fits. With this view, the many who know the work of the garment-maker — cutting, constructing, altering — that is, a uni-directional making toward a goal of a “finished” garment, will not find deconstruction fashion startlingly original or more than a reversal of this practice of the garment-maker."

"Margiela deconstructs the aura of the designer garment, and by extension the industry that upholds the myth of innovation, by messing with its integrity and innovation, by stitching a dialogue with the past into its future. When his recycled garments are literally turned inside out, apart from ravaging the finish of the garment, the frame that holds them together is also revealed like a clothing skeleton."